A former vice president of biotechnology at Monsanto believes the key to changing public perceptions about powerful tools such as gene editing lies in producing products with undeniable consumer appeal.
US-based Tom Adams spent twenty years working with Monsanto before leaving in April to help launch Pairwise - a company that uses gene editing to create new crops and improve existing varieties.
The company was founded by some of the biggest names in the gene editing game - including Harvard University Professor of Chemistry, David Liu who pioneered base editing and Feng Zhang who developed the CRISPR-Cas9 system.
Pairwise’s client list also includes some major players, including Bayer, who commissioned the company to work on cotton, corn, soy, canola and wheat for the next five years.
Dr. Adams, who is the CEO, said most of that work would be about creating varieties with enhanced producer traits, such as higher yields using less nutrients and water.
Speaking at Bayer’s Future of Farming Dialogue in Germany in September, Dr. Adams said tools such as CRISPR coupled with big advances in data science had changed plant breeding from a process of simply crossing traits to discover an outcome to one where breeders could design the outcome.
“That’s really an amazing opportunity and I think over the next thirty years we are going to see more innovation in crops than we have seen over the past 10,000 years,” he said.
While broadacre crops form a large part of Pairwise’s work, Dr. Adams said a key focus for the company was the produce aisle of modern supermarkets.
“We think there is an opportunity there to focus on how we can modify those crops to make healthy foods more convenient, available and sustainable,” he said.
“Think about traits like seedlessness, shelf life, size - things that make vegetables and fruits more snackable.”
Dr. Adams used dwarf carrots as an example of what could be achieved.
“They developed carrots that were half the size and now they sell twice as many and people pay a lot more for them,” he said.
“When people are walking through a store and they normally turn left towards the fatty, salty chip isle, we want them to instead turn to the produce aisle.
“We have already seen that with some processing type activities and I think developing the genetics underlying that can make a big difference so everyone can benefit from CRISPR technology.”
But how would producers react to a produce aisle stacked with genetically modified fruit and vegetables?
Positively, Dr. Adams believes, if the product is what the consumer wants.
“The biggest impact will be to create some products that consumers can interact with where they like the product so much that they don’t really care how it is made,” he said.
“Nobody cares how you make a seedless watermelon because we all really like seedless watermelons.
“Even though it involves a lab process.”
But ignoring the consumer completely would be a mistake, Dr Adams warned.
“I think we all understand that is important to bring the consumer into the conversation, even if it isn’t a direct consumer like when we are working with corn,” he said.
“That is the one thing we all missed twenty years ago.”
